by Cash Peters
Half of me—the dark, pathetic half—is hoping that they'll whisk the little girl away with them in their rush to get indoors, so that I won't have to deal with this situation or feel the depth of survivor's guilt that I do. But that's not the case. When the crowd dissipates, she's still there, in her pretty lace-trimmed floral summer dress, leaning against a stone balustrade. And we're right back where we started.
Doe-eyed, she rattles her cup, surveying my awkwardness calmly from behind the flap of pale grafted skin that connects her top lip to her forehead. I guess she's used to moments like this, to rejection, double-takes, revulsion, the slow drip of pity from passersby, and is inured to them. But knowing this doesn't make it any easier to deal with, or alleviate the profound sadness I feel as I try to avoid staring at her.
“No,” I plead silently, “please don't rattle your cup at me. I have nothing to give you.”
I want to explain that I'm making a dumb, gimmicky TV travel show where I visit foreign lands without money and pretend I'm hungry and desperate and poor. Christ, what a feeble concept that's seeming right now; what a miserably lame idea for a piece of so-called entertainment. I don't even carry loose change. Whatever money I have is given to Tasha between shots for safekeeping. As proof, I drag the lining out of my trouser pockets, mumbling under my breath, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”
Then, badly shaken, and stung to the point of tears, I do what everyone else seems to do to the girl with no nose: I dive through the temple doors and run off.
If you can work it that you visit Angkor Wat in the early hours of the morning while the tourists are back at their hotel eating breakfast, or in the evening while they're having dinner, it's a blissful, entrancing experience. Or so I hear. As it is, I arrive midafternoon and find that the reverie of traveling through time is almost impossible here, marred as it is by Swedish babies crying, Argentinean camera shutters turning over, German students scrunching together for a group photo, and the infuriating nonstop clatter-patter of sensible English walking shoes echoing down the dark stone passageways. It's utterly depressing. Like watching ants dismantle a dead bird. I mean, if you can't be alone even for a couple of seconds in a place that was constructed for that very purpose, then you can't find peace, and what's a temple without peace? It's just a building.
Curiously, even if you take the initiative and walk against the flow, somehow you end up in the same place as everyone else: a giant, scalable stone tower on the roof. Shaped like an elongated pyramid, it rises steep and looms ominous, and is supposed to represent Mount Meru, home of the gods in Hindu tradition. It was here, at its summit, that King Suryavarman erected a giant golden statue honoring Vishnu, who, though acclaimed as “the creator of all things,” appeared, when it came to constructing this tower anyway, to be very much dependent on mankind to knuckle down and do the heavy lifting for him.
The statue was placed at the tip of some thin stone steps, more like little ledges really, numbering around twenty-five in all, rising to a point some thirty feet high. Think of it as an early Cambodian escalator, one that's broken and no longer moves.
Cowering in an alcove out of the lashing rain, I watch amused, along with a crowd of eager spectators, as several elderly robust grandmothers from the American Midwest tell themselves that you can't come all the way from Ohio to the greatest Buddhist temple in the world and not see the golden statue of Vishnu, can you? Of course not. So, goading each other with clucking noises and cries of “chicken,” they take a deep breath, adjust their plastic rain hats, smear water off their spectacles, and brave the downpour to begin their mission.
“Don't look down!” some wag shouts at them when they're still on the first step.
“Martha! Martha, over here,” someone else cries, waving a camera. “Smile.”
But Martha is in no mood to smile. Gutsily, she soldiers on against the raging elements, scaling a further seven steps before pausing for breath, at which point a vexatious westerly wind, sensing an opportunity for comedy, rushes in to lift up her pleated gray skirt, exposing a flash of senior buttock-flab to the crowd below. More senior buttock-flab, I'd say, than any human being with a gag reflex ought to be exposed to.
“Okay, off you go,” Jay manifests out of nowhere and hisses in my ear. “Give us five minutes, then start climbing. I'll tell Kevin.”
“Excuse me—are you out of your freakin’ mind?” Fat Kid's rousing pep talk is suddenly a distant memory. “Have you seen how high it is? I am not—repeat, NOT—going up there!”
But Jay's a different directing animal from Mark, harder to dissuade. Faced with any obstacle—a reluctant TV host is the first example that comes to mind—he adopts one of those long-suffering expressions he does so well, of a mother supervising a petulant three-year-old whom she loves dearly, but not today, not right now, and sighs heavily.
“Cash,” he groans, “you'll be fine. If a bunch of old biddies can climb it, I'm sure you can. Now—go.” Then, without even allowing me the common courtesy of arguing with him, he plows deep into the crowd, shouting over his shoulder, “Don't bother about where the camera is, Kevin will find you. Just keep climbing.”
Two steps from the top, Martha has staggered to a premature halt. Aware now that two hundred people are looking up her skirt, she tries to grip it between her knees, a move that could be her undoing. Several shaky squeals are lost amidst the laughter and general hullabaloo in the courtyard, as still more people, teased into joining this folly, each of them thinking, “Well, if the old bag in the pink bloomers can do it, so can I!,” tie on rain hats and start their own ascent.
As I watch their feet slither and slide across the watery ledges, the same ugly, gnawing fear I felt staring into that 134-meter gorge in New Zealand and Mount Yasur's fiery crater, begins eating away at my intestines once again.
I hate heights! Is nobody listening to me when I say this? I hate heights.
And remember, my definition of heights is pretty modest, too: anything higher than a bar stool, really. Yet, even as the tension is choking me, I recall Fat Kid's admonitions: teamwork, collaboration, it's not just about me, and so on. And as I do, in some peculiar way it weakens the grip of my terror a little, infusing it with an unexpected surge of resolve. Maybe I can do this. If I just focus my mind and ignore the drop.
Besides, I reason to myself, if I do lose my footing on the steps, there'll be enough old women in rain hats coming up behind me to cushion my fall, won't there?
Good thinking.
Considerably cheered by this, I wait five minutes, then run through the rain to the base of the pyramid.
As it is, my worst fears prove to be groundless. The climb is a breeze and takes me a mere ten minutes top to bottom. I even overtake Martha and her slow-coach friends on the way up, as I make it, damp, dizzy, out of breath, and with pins and needles in my feet, to the top step and the very summit of Mount Meru.
Yay!
Who would have thought that? Sir contained his anxiety for long enough to climb a pyramid! If I had a baton I would twirl it. Indeed, so slap-happy am I at this rare triumph over one of my phobias that I perch jauntily on the edge for a while to allow the camera, which I'm unable to spot in the scrum below but I know is there somewhere, to record and savor this valiant accomplishment.
Then, once I've left enough time for Kevin to get his shot, I head off in search of the giant golden statue of Vishnu.
That's when I realize two things: first, there is no statue. It was apparently looted centuries ago, leaving one big dark empty space thirty feet up in the air that, take it from me, is not worth all the effort it takes to reach it. And second, once you grow tired of looking at a big dark empty space and decide to take the back stairs down to the bottom again, there are no back stairs either. I thought there might be, but there aren't.
I hunted for several minutes, pacing the missing-statue area five times, like a small kid lost in a department store, traipsing disconsolately in rectangular circles, becoming more agitated with every ci
rcuit.
“There has to be a back way,” I thought. “There's always a back way.”
But King Suryavarman, when he built this thing, it appears, had no exit strategy. The tower was the home of the gods, and the gods, because they were invented by man as a means of holding a primitive society together by fear, never came down to mingle with their subjects. How could they? They weren't there in the first place.
Instantly, my body registers how high I am off the ground—which is really, really high—and freezes. A rush of vertigo sends chills fizzing beneath my flesh. My feet feel light. The hair on my neck is bristling. And, oh God, my scrotum is starting to tingle—like it's full of champagne bubbles. In my world that's a sure sign something is about to happen. Could be bad or good, I'm never sure—my scrotum doesn't differentiate.
All of a sudden, the wind renews its efforts to dislodge me, tossing fresh squalls of warm rain into my face. I'm quite a way from the edge, eight feet or so, yet convinced I'm about to be blown over. Wrapping both arms around a pillar, I hug it tight, helpless, wet, and paralyzed with terror, as streams of people—Martha and her friends among them—double back, threading their way through the deluge, down the steps to roof level again.
It's then I hear a familiar voice. “Cash, what happened?”
Oh, thank Vishnu!
“I …” I turn to find Jay standing behind me. “I …”
“We've been waiting for you. Are you okay?”
“I … can't get down.”
“Of course you can. Follow me.”
“Jay, I can't.”
“Yes you can.” Man, this guy doesn't brook any objections.
“It's too high. The steps are too thin.”
“Come on. I'll go first and I'll make sure you don't fall, okay?”
There's a rope. A flimsy, ever-shifting rope. You're meant to hold onto it the whole way, hugging the right-hand side of the steps to avoid colliding with those climbing up. The plan is to create order out of chaos, but as far as I can tell it actually halves the order and quadruples the chaos. Everyone's sliding and shouting. Arms flail, toes dangle, seeking something solid to grip onto and occasionally finding it, but just as often slipping right off the wet stones into the back of the person below them, knocking them forward into the next person in the chain. In my case that person would be Jay, who nonetheless soldiers on stoically like he always does.
Eventually, with his help, and also of course by the good graces of Vishnu—I don't care if he is fictional, Vishnu's the man, baby!—my feet land on solid ground once more and I'm free.
Gasping, unsteady, relieved.
“So how did it all look?” I ask afterwards, pausing to get my breath back.
Jay takes out the clock he always carries with him. We're behind schedule. Gotta go. At the same time he's shaking his head and glances up at me forlornly.
“What? Something's wrong? What happened?”
“We didn't get it,” he says. “That's what I came up to tell you. Kevin wasn't ready in time.”
He … there's … I'm … what??????
All that turmoil—the climbing, the danger, the sodden clothes, the panic—and he shot no footage at all of my resounding victory?
“I'm afraid so.”
Jay shrugs. Adding, “Oh,” as we push through the crowd, “and another thing: your microphone gave out halfway, so there's no sound either.”
It—but—how—I mean, I—
“Sorry.”
1 Which I still feel they should adopt as their promotional slogan. It's a winner. Call me, Vanuatu, we'll talk.
2 Funny how that works.
3 Rare for me to have any money on these shows, but back in L.A., anticipating that I wouldn't be able to pay for the tuk-tuk otherwise, the office had thought ahead and given me a wristwatch, to be used for bartering. With Rith's help I exchanged this in the market for thirteen dollars, which for an object with such profound sentimental value doesn't seem like a lot, but by Cambodian standards it's a fortune. I went in with nothing and came out as the new Bill Gates. Flush with cash, I bought a hat with a brim to protect me against the thrashing heat of the sun, as well as some weird sticky rice and bean banana-leaf burrito thing that Rith recommended as a local delicacy but which was disgusting. Ever eaten warm cavity wall insulation? Or laplap straight from the ground? It was like that.
4 How much worse can things get than that? You're a limbless beggar confined to the gutter in Cambodia and now your cup is broken, so the money drops out. Seriously, is there a God? You tell me, because I'm not sure any more.
5 Yes, he was still with us! He followed us around everywhere like a stray dog, mesmerized by the whole TV thing. Try as I might, I couldn't shake the guy off. Indeed, Sir was all for calling the cops—until I discovered he was now doubling as our translator, and I'd be doing the show a disservice if I went out of my way to have him arrested.
6 Before you say it, I know fifteen dollars is more than I made from selling the watch in the market. And yes, I've also bought a hat since then, plus that slimy burrito thing and a tuk-tuk ride, out of the original money, leaving me with about two dollars. “So how can you afford fifteen dollars for an elephant ride now, then?” you're asking. “It doesn't make sense.” To which I would say, “Good point. Well spotted. But this is TV. Let's not ruin it with logic.”
7 Probably.
8 Two hundred and twenty in this area alone. It's all people did in those days, apparently. That, and tear them down again.
11
A Gift from the
Network!
When a reality TV show is set to launch, a whole bunch of extra last-minute duties are piled on the host. One of these, I discovered when it was already too late to wriggle out of it, is called “attending the up-fronts.”
The up-fronts are a blast. Almost every network has them. It's an annual shindig where nervous TV executives, anxious to know whether they'll still have a job in a year, fly to key cities throughout the United States to parade their latest programs before potential advertisers and the press. Of course, left to me it would be a very simple affair indeed. Everyone would receive a DVD in the mail, and maybe a Starbucks voucher for a free latte to prove we're not cheap, and that would be it. If they liked the shows on the DVD, great; if they didn't—pah, screw 'em! And quite honestly, you can't get more up-front than that!
Trouble is, advertisers love junkets. It's their Achilles’ heel. Their financial affections must be wooed, teased out of them. They want glamour, they want to be fêted and plied with free booze and snacks. So, with that end in mind, what in most industries would amount to a routine twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation with a leaflet to take home at the end, gets fleshed out into a splashy two-day bonanza in a big expensive theater filled with TV stars, musical numbers, and skits, anything in fact that might persuade world-weary marketing people to reach for their checkbooks and reserve a bunch of advertising spots “up front.” In other words, before the new season begins.
And so it was with our little effort. Since the series was to be a linchpin of the network's summer schedule, I was sent a first-class ticket to the East Coast and told to break off from whatever I was doing—which happened to be making a TV show; duh—and go peddle my wares like an Edwardian knife grinder at the up-front in New York.
The hotel the network booked me into, the Trump International on Columbus Circle, turned out to be a very classy place indeed. One of those high-end hotels where the staff nannies you and fusses with almost obsessive enthusiasm. For instance, they all remember your name. I don't know how they do this, but they do. During my brief stay I must have made five surprise visits to reception for five different reasons, and, each time the girl on the desk looked up and said instantly, “Yes, Mr. Peters, how may I help you?” without consulting a book or a screen, or having someone hold up cue cards, or anything.
And my suite was terrific. Three rooms: bedroom, well-stocked kitchenette, and a large living room with automatic drapes—oooo
h!—that opened to reveal a quick glimpse of the Manhattan skyline and then closed again like one of those old amusement arcade slot machines, leaving me wanting more. Once I'd done playing with those—and I'll be honest, it was a while—the porter showed me how the lights worked and where the remote for the TV was, slipping in at the end that “every suite at the Trump has its own personalized phone and fax number, it's not an extension.”
How about that!
“Oh, look, there's even a business card here with my name already printed on it!”
“Yes, sir.”
Excellent.
Thin and cheap-looking, admittedly, but excellent. I still have a stack of them. Next time you meet me, ask for one. We can keep in touch.
Also, on the nightstand I found a bag with a free iPod in it. A present from the network, apparently. Well, how very generous of them.
Anyway, I slipped the porter two bucks, which he stared at for a moment, before thanking me, but in a neutral tone perfected after years and years of not being impressed by things, and left.
The moment the door closed, I leaped to my personalized Trump phone to call Mandy, an old friend of mine from London, who was in town for a couple of days, and invited her to come see my swanky New York pad.
A beautiful, diminutive ball of love wrapped in a black knee-length leather coat and topped off with an explosion of fiery red hair, she was suitably impressed by the suite, though less so by my business cards, which she surveyed with discerning peppermint green eyes, doubtless thinking, “But they're so thin and cheap-looking,” before putting them down without comment.
Once we'd chatted for a while and caught up, I went off to play with the drapes again and make a couple of extra calls on my personalized phone, while Mandy occupied herself out of sight in the kitchen, where she cracked open a complimentary can of peanuts and stuck a corkscrew into a complimentary half-bottle of Chardonnay, pouring herself a generous glass, maybe even two. In fact, I only know she did this because, two days later, when it came time to check out, I received a whopping bill for incidentals. The wine and peanuts weren't complimentary at all, it turns out. Far from it.